On many occasions, consumers may find it desirable to enroll in a consumer program to receive consumer rewards for purchases made at the consumer's favorite online and/or brick-and-mortar merchant stores. In these and other cases, it is often undesirable to carry additional cards or coupons to receive the benefit of brick-and-mortar stores. Gift cards, loyalty cards, and coupons are inconvenient for the recipient as well, in that consumers' wallets are overstuffed with cards and coupons that rarely get used. The recipient must remember to bring the gift card with him to redeem the gift card. Also, often times the gift card has an unknown balance on it. These cards can also be lost and/or expire. With respect to online merchants, it is often undesirable to enroll in separate consumer programs with respect to each online merchant, such that a consumer must not only enroll for each merchant, but the consumer must also remember a particular username and password for each merchant's consumer program. These and other drawbacks exist to the aforementioned, as well as other alternatives to consumer programs and coupons. The present inventors believe that there is a market to use the form of payment made by a consumer at a merchant's store (online and/or brick-and-mortar) to initially register the consumer in a consumer program associated with the merchant's store by linking the consumer's form of payment to the consumer program, such that the merchant can automatically identify the consumer as a member in the consumer program (and the consumer can automatically receive the benefits of the consumer program) when future purchases are made at the merchant by the consumer using a form of payment associated with the consumer.